Tailhook Scandal Rocks El Toro : Military: Sexual harassment investigation divides Marine base. Some call the inquiry a witch hunt, while others call for court-martials.

The nation is at peace, but not so the Marine Corps.

The Tailhook sexual assault scandal has rattled this base like sniper fire, implicating five men once stationed here and jarring the nerves of a hundred others required to give statements about what they saw at the 1991 Tailhook Convention in Las Vegas. Twenty-six women say they were pawed, stripped and bitten as they were goaded down a hotel hallway there through a gantlet of drunk pilots.

The scandal continues to wound the tightknit El Toro community. Some say they hope that the perpetrators are caught and court-martialed. Others complain that the investigation has become a witch hunt that is ruining careers of innocent people.

Male Marines are terrified of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct, while females wonder why it took a national scandal to make the military take sexual harassment seriously.

And there is a backlash brewing.

“I will not let any woman in my office with the door closed. It’s going to be just like a doctor’s office,” said one El Toro commander. “It only takes one, and an accusation is tantamount to guilt in today’s environment.”

The woman who commands all El Toro enlisted Marines, Sgt. Maj. Sylvia D. Walters, said the Navy’s vaunted policy of “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment acquired teeth only about four months ago, when the inauspiciously named Tailhook Convention began generating daily headlines.

“If your shorts don’t get snapped, it doesn’t pertain to you,” said Walters, who joined a gender-segregated Marine Corps 26 years ago and is one of its 20 highest-ranked enlisted women.

“We’re really reacting big-time to this, trying to take a lot of corrective measures in a short period of time, trying to change attitudes overnight, which is never going to happen,” Walters said.

Every Marine on the El Toro base--along with every member of the Navy--is undergoing a mandatory class in recognizing and preventing sexual harassment. Base officials say they hope that the sensitivity training scheduled to begin soon in boot camp will vastly reduce sexual harassment in the Corps, just as military service and training have helped defuse racism.

Ten months after the Tailhook Convention, and three weeks after Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned in taking responsibility for the scandal, no one has been charged with wrongdoing.

The U.S. Naval Investigative Service was pulled off the case after allegations that the Navy was doing a poor job of investigating itself. Now, a new task force from the inspector general’s office of the Defense Department is taking over the case.

According to sources familiar with the inquiry, five men formerly or now based at El Toro are under suspicion for offenses ranging from indecent assault to obstruction of justice for lying to investigators. No one has been charged.

Neither El Toro spokeswoman Capt. Betsy Sweatt nor Defense Department spokesmen would comment on the investigation. However, according to information gathered by the Naval Investigative Service, sources familiar with the investigation, and pilots and others who attended the Tailhook Convention, the chief suspect in the reported assault on Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin--the first woman to make her charges public--is an F-18 pilot assigned here to a tactical reconnaissance squadron that was disbanded two years ago.

Sources said many El Toro aviators, like naval officers elsewhere in the country, have been uncooperative in dealing with investigators.

“Nobody saw anything and nobody did anything,” one source complained. “A couple of guys said they’d had an officers meeting and been told not to cooperate.”

Another former El Toro Marine and pilot said some senior officers, especially aviators, “will do everything in their power--and sometimes things not within their power--to protect their men.

“If you break the faith, how is anybody ever going to trust you in combat?”

Plenty of El Toro Marines are furious at the miscreants and say any guilty officer is honor-bound to come forward and spare the Marine Corps--and fellow officers--further humiliation.

“It’s sickening,” said Lt. Col Henry (Skeeter) Commiskey. “We were all appalled. I think everyone would like to have the guys found, court-martialed and kicked out.”

But amid charges of cover-ups, smears and witch hunts, getting to the bottom of Tailhook will not be easy.

One of the five officers said he has not been informed he is under suspicion, and vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

Although up to 5,000 people attended Tailhook, only Marine and Navy aviators have been interviewed, while Air Force pilots and other military personnel, as well as the many civilians who attended, have not been questioned, he said.

“It was not a bunch of people running around with underwear on their heads,” he said. “It was basically a cocktail party.”

Further muddying the waters are the so-called “aviator groupies.” These are civilian women who idolize “Top Gun” pilots and who come each year to Tailhook to try to meet them.

“There’s women out there who are looking for real men. (Tailhook) is one of the places you can find them,” another aviator said.

The aviator said that after the Persian Gulf War, pressure mounted to allow women into combat. But the message from Tailhook--where half of the victims were naval officers--is that women cannot defend themselves, he said.

“Are these women going to be warriors or not?” he asked, suggesting that a female soldier fondled without permission should hit back on the spot--or return with enough friends to even the score. “That’s how a warrior would handle it,” he said. “They don’t go crying to daddy. . . . If women want to get respect, that’s how they earn it.”

Coughlin said some of the aviators’ remarks are aimed at discrediting any woman who reports a sexual attack, and amount to “blaming the victim.”

“I’m getting a lot more thick-skinned than I ever thought,” she said last week. “Nobody that’s a Marine officer would want what happened to me to happen to anybody they love.”

Others say that Tailhook has left a legacy of fear and suspicion. “Pretty soon the boys and the girls won’t talk to each other anymore. They’ll be afraid to,” Walters said. “I’m not sure it’ll really be better. I just think people will be more careful about what they say or do. Whether they actually mean it or not is a whole ‘nother ballgame.”